United States Senate election in Alabama, 2014

Three-term incumbent Republican Jeff Sessions was re-elected with 63% of the vote in 2008. He will be 67 years old in 2014.

History of Alabama. Information that every Alabama Senator Candidate Should Know.

Alabama became a state of the United States of America on December 14, 1819. After the Indian Wars and removals of the early 19th century forced most Native Americans out of the state, white settlers arrived in large numbers.

In antebellum Alabama, wealthy planters created large cotton plantations based in the fertile central Black Belt, which depended on the labor of enslaved African Americans. Tens of thousands of slaves were transported to and sold in the state by slave traders who purchased them in the Upper South. Elsewhere in Alabama, poorer whites practiced subsistence farming. By 1860 blacks (nearly all slaves) comprised 45 percent of the state's 964,201 people.

The state wished to continue and expand slavery. Feeling pressured by the Northern states, Alabama declared its secession in January 1861 and joined the Confederate States of Americain February. The ensuing American Civil War saw moderate levels of action in Alabama, and the population suffered economic losses and hardships as a result of the war. Lincoln'sEmancipation Proclamation freed all enslaved people in confederate states. The Southern capitulation in 1865 ended the Confederate state government and began a controversial and difficult decade of Reconstruction.